Funk Father, Shining Sons

By

Andy Battaglia

Updated Feb. 5, 2013 9:07 p.m. ET

Mumford & Sons

Barclays Center 620 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, (917) 618-6700 Wednesday

ENLARGE

Marcus Mumford
Getty Images

From their presumably vintage-decorated station in London, Mumford & Sons have led a folk revival played to the tune of banjo, fiddle, mandolin, accordion, horns and other instruments evocative of ages gone by. There's a mix of jug-band looseness and pioneering mountain-pass fervor to songs on "Babel," the group's hit album from last year. But more than gentle sepia-toned reminiscence, Mumford & Sons summon the spirit and seething intensity of songs meant to be more than museum pieces. Their approach has garnered the approval of Bob Dylan, who joined them onstage at the 2011 Grammys, as well as legions of followers on Spotify, which logged a record-breaking 8 million streams of "Babel" in its first week of release.

George Clinton & The P-Funk All-Stars

B.B. King Blues Club & Grill 237 W. 42nd St., (212) 997-4144 Feb. 12

Parliament-Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton has never lacked sufficient reason to throw an intergalactic party. But a gathering of his P-Funk All-Stars on "Fat Tuesday" (the eve of Mardi Gras) seems especially apt. How will the occasion play for a funk legend whose everyday doings make Mardi Gras seem routine? It's hard to know, exactly, but theatricality is his wont—even as a 71-year-old who could just as easily leave the life of funk behind. Mr. Clinton has been active in different contexts in recent years, recording with OutKast rapper Big Boi and, last year, performing at the Insane Clown Posse's notorious festival the Gathering of the Juggalos. Beyond that, he still dyes his hair—and not just to hide the gray.

Matmos

(Le) Poisson Rouge 158 Bleecker St., (212) 505-3474 Feb. 11

Matmos is a shifty electronic-music duo that brings dueling senses of functionalism and fun to all manner of cerebral pursuits. The two creative conceptualists—M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel—once made an album using snippets of sounds sourced from surgery. For another work, they re-imagined Civil War-era battlefield marches as digital-age hymns. In an exercise even more rare, they paid tribute in club-bumping song to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. For their new project, "The Marriage of True Minds," Matmos takes up telepathy and plays with the reactions of test subjects submitted to sensory-deprivation techniques in the interest of having the album's concept transmitted directly into their minds. The results are as enjoyable as they are abstract—and they are abstract indeed.

Swans

Few bands have mastered what Woody Allen once dismissively called rock's "heaviosity" as thoroughly or as well as Swans. Part of their strategy is to dress songs in wispy layers that compound in deceptive stores of mass, and the other part is to do away with thinking about the conventions of "rock" altogether. As contemporaries of 1980s and '90s New York noise bands like Sonic Youth, Swans were famous for playing at punishing, pummeling volume. But they also know that eerie moans and murmurs can be as affecting as a scream when directed expressly at the head. The effect plays out to dark rapture on fabled Swans records of yore, and it manifests no less menacingly on "The Seer," a double-album from last year that marks a high point in the group's recent late-period surge.

Lindsey Stirling

Webster Hall 125 E. 11th St., (212) 353-1600 Saturday

It's a thrill to hear genres digress and dissolve in the midst of our manic musical times. But what is a listener to make of a violinist described as "Mozart meets Skrillex"? Does Lindsey Stirling have what it takes to make sense of a fusion composed of careening classical-music motifs and dubstep's concussive electronic sounds? Would such a chimera be desirable, even theoretically? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, the 26-year-old Ms. Stirling, epochal in her way, has found an audience, first as a contender on the (perhaps paradoxically titled) TV show "America's Got Talent" and, later, with a series of recordings and live performances that don't shy away from the prospects of prizing spectacle over seemliness.

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